Graduate Student

Research and Teaching Interests

Discipline

Entered Program

Advisor

Degree(s)

B.A. DePaul University

Hometown

Arlington Heights, Illinois

Professional Goals

Interest in career and technical education, and more broadly, preparing students to work has become a greater focus of educators and education policy makers. The research I conduct, as part of my doctoral work and later in my career, will look to better understand teacher practice in this environment and will hopefully inform future teacher interventions.

LSRI Projects

I am currently working with Dr. Allison Castro Superfine on the Improving Formative Assessment to Support Teaching (iFAST) project which studies how middle school students learn important concepts in algebra and how teachers support student learning. I am also working with Dr. Superfine on the Looking Across Professions (LAP) project, which looks to understand the nature of teaching practice of instructors in automotive technology courses at the community college level.

I am also part of Project INCLUDES, which focuses on re-engaging the disengaged using a community-centered approach to improve STEM pathways for underrepresented students. As part of this project, I am the coordinator of the STEM advocacy center, graduate assistant for curriculum, and am also helping develop an app that will help engage the Pilsen community with issues of STEM pertinent to the community.

Hobbies & Interests

I enjoy home improvement projects, working on classic cars, figuring out the question to the answer: 42, and am a very low-key audiophile.

Why Learning Sciences?

During my time as a teacher, I began to have questions about the general effectiveness of teaching. I began to question what the assessments I gave to my students were really assessing. I also had broader questions about the nature of facilitating students into a given career. Learning Sciences allows me to explore both the basic and applied aspects of these questions. Because Learning Sciences looks to both gain a fundamental understanding of learning and to apply that knowledge into useful interventions, I was able to explore the questions I had about learning as well as embrace my practical side through applying my research in learning environment design.

Why LSRI at UIC?

The roster of accomplished faculty speaks for itself and was definitely a draw for me to LSRI. Beyond being accomplished, LSRI’s research interests are broad and welcoming to a diverse range of research interests. While this was the initial draw to LSRI, I have found that the diversity of researchers here draws other researchers from diverse backgrounds. The speaker series in LSRI represents researchers from many universities from many research backgrounds. The exposure to these speakers on a regular basis has been extremely helpful for my burgeoning research.

Beyond the research perspective, being at UIC allows me to be in a thriving urban environment, which is important to me. I enjoy city living and the affordances that come with it.